In traditional societies, little to no food goes to waste. Every edible part of an animal or plant is utilised. Researchers found that the members of a Maasai cattle herding community in northern Tanzania were outraged at the thought of intentionally wasting food, calling those who would do so “lunatics”. Some even said it was worse than killing a person, because murder leads to one death, whereas wasting food could result in several.
Attitudes towards waste are very different in industrialised nations. The United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) estimates that 17% of total global food production is wasted and around the same amount lost, meaning that around a third of food produced is not consumed. The global average for household waste is 74kg per person annually, and this figure is broadly similar for lower-, middle- and high-income countries.
In addition to food waste, there is also food loss: crop and livestock commodities destined for human consumption which are discarded before entering the retail sector. This could be because of failure to harvest, poor storage, deterioration in transport, or simply being left to rot because there is no buyer.
Over recent decades, food waste and loss has become more of a salient moral issue across the world. One of the UN’s sustainable development goals is to “halve per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels”, along with the less specific aim of “reducing food losses along production and supply chains”.
Many believe reducing waste is essential for feeding the world. For example, the World Resources Institute opens its report into food waste and loss by asking “How is the world going to feed nearly 10 billion people?”, and argues that halving food waste “would close the gap between food needed in 2050 and food available in 2010 by more than 20%”. However, this framing is questionable. Back in 1961, the world produced fewer than 2,200 calories per person a day, barely enough to cover the needs of its men and women, who on average need about 2,500 and 2,000 calories a day, respectively. By 2020, the world was producing much more food than its inhabitants eat: nearly 3,000 calories per person a day. Even with the quantities that we waste, there is enough food in the world to feed everyone. Distribution and affordability are greater obstacles to good nutrition. But although hunger is not the problem now, it soon could be. With the global population still rising, and climate breakdown and geopolitical instability already disrupting agriculture worldwide, in order to avert starvation, it could soon become imperative that we make as much use of what we produce as possible.
At the moment, the greatest impact of food waste is on the climate crisis. Unep estimates that 8% to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions are associated with food that is not consumed. As it says: “If food loss and waste were a country, it would be the third biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions.” In poorer countries it increases food insecurity and everywhere it adds to biodiversity loss, because a lot of land is turned over to cultivation without it ultimately feeding anyone. Every informed observer agrees that food waste and loss must be reduced. But can we do it?
Waste and loss are often portrayed as egregious, easily avoided if only people would take a bit more care about how much they buy and how they use it. Further up the supply chain, farmers deal with challenges around food waste, too. For one thing, they are at the mercy of inflexible procurement requirements. It is common for buyers – whether intermediaries, wholesalers or retailers – to require a farmer to have a certain quantity of a commodity like rice ready to sell without accepting any obligation to buy all of it. This is a major problem with fresh seasonal fruit and vegetables. A large supermarket may require its supplier to have a certain number of heads of lettuce ready, but if it is a cool, damp summer week, the buyer may only take half, leaving the farmer with the useless surplus.
Retailers are very good at pushing waste upstream and downstream. Not only are suppliers often left with excess production, consumers are encouraged to buy more than they can eat by bulk deals and pricing that makes larger sizes more economic. The food waste campaigner Selina Juul says that this is more accurately described as “buy three, pay for two, waste one”.
Such waste as the retailers directly produce is partly due to failures of supply-and-demand forecasting and planning. But the big players have got so good at this that it is not a major problem. A bigger issue is norms and attitudes. Supermarkets like to have full shelves, as they know that half-empty ones look unappealing. So they have historically tended to oversupply, preferring to throw out unsold loaves at the end of the day to running out of bread hours before closing. Products like uncooked rice, lentils or pasta, with their long shelf lives, are rarely wasted at the retail stage, except when the packaging is damaged. The bulk of retail food waste comes from fresh foods, including ready meals.
Once food reaches homes, waste is often the result of problems of inadequate management practices, skills and knowledge. Many households find themselves disposing of the contents of a bag or box found in the back of a cupboard after the best-before date has expired. Dates on packs are very conservative, and if dried products like rice or pasta are stored properly – dry and in airtight containers – it can last long after the pack date. But if you are not confident in knowing the signs of mould (discoloration, visible growth, a rancid or otherwise bad smell), it can feel risky to cook it.
Many people routinely cook more than is needed for a meal and end up throwing a lot out. Rice is a common side dish when eating Asian food in restaurants or as takeaways, and almost invariably more is served than is eaten. Many of us are aware that reheated rice carries the risk of food poisoning, thanks to the bacterium Bacillus cereus. But the bacterium will not grow unless the cooked rice is left warm for at least a couple of hours and then reheated. Cold cooked rice is very low risk, and if it is cooled, put in a container and refrigerated within a few hours, it is perfectly safe to reheat.
Much household food waste is the result of bad meal planning. But a lot can be attributed to a basic lack of awareness. Too many of us have become used to abundance and have lost the thrifty mentality of previous generations. We don’t think of food waste as an issue. Once we shift our mindset and see every item of food thrown away as a failure, we naturally adopt the habits that make food wastage more of a rarity.
If food waste and loss is such a complex problem, how come Denmark reduced its food waste by 25% in just five years, between 2010 and 2015? This was the cumulative result of many small changes, but the main reason it happened was because of one woman and social media. Selina Juul was a graphic designer, “not even a food person”, she told me. But, appalled to discover how much food was going to waste in her country, in 2008 she started a Facebook group Stop Spild Af Mad (Stop wasting food). Within a fortnight it had gone viral, and just three months later she was approached by REMA 1000, the biggest discount chain in Denmark, who asked her to help them reduce their waste. Among the steps they took was to end bulk discounts like “buy two, get one free”. They also started selling bananas individually, putting up signs saying, “Take me, I’m single”. One retailer reported that after the change, instead of 80 to 100 bananas being wasted every day, only about 10 were.
Before long, Juul was being called upon by the Danish minister for the environment, the UN, the EU, the Vatican and Princess Mary of Denmark. She found herself featured by the BBC, CNN and the New York Times. She is widely credited with being the catalyst for Denmark’s dramatic cut in food waste, winning multiple awards such as Dane of the Year in 2014 and the Nordic Council Nature and Environment Prize 2013. It’s a good-news story but a highly qualified one, because the great leap forward was a one-off. No other country has done as well. “Denmark is a small country,” says Juul. “We are like a tribe, and it’s very easy to get in the news if you have a good story, very easy to affect the population if there’s a good cause.” The Danes were already very environmentally aware, and Juul was a charismatic frontwoman in an age where personality counts for a lot.
In Britain, by contrast, the estimable Tristram Stuart has been at least as tireless at campaigning against food waste, but he lacks Juul’s magnetism and is up against a citizenry that seems to resent even having to sort its recycling for collection. Whereas the Danish government embraced the cause with gusto and is developing a food waste strategy, in 2019, Michael Gove when environment secretary appointed as the British government’s “food surplus and waste champion” a man who ran a concierge firm for ultra-high net worth individuals.
Juul may also have been helped by avoiding the anti-capitalist and anti-corporate radicalism of many environmental movements. As she told CNN: “Lots of environmental NGOs go out to rally against industrial actors, and it is the wrong approach. If you do that, they won’t work with you. We don’t scold anyone. We say: we are all part of the problem, and also the solution.”
Despite the factors that went Juul’s way, Denmark does not seem to have built much on its early success. It’s hard to tell because of a lack of proper measurements. “Food waste is not an exact science,” says Juul.
The old maxim “What gets measured gets managed” is crucial for food wastage. In order to act on waste and loss you need to have a clear target for the reductions you want to achieve and tools to measure their progress, so that actions are appropriate and effective. Yet in most countries this basic requirement isn’t being met. In the UK, for example, the government abandoned planned legislation to make food-waste reporting mandatory for large and medium-sized businesses in England.
Juul warns that “the fight against the food-waste agenda is on the verge of greenwashing”. Well-intentioned efforts risk getting caught up in this. She points to the food-waste app Too Good to Go, which she advised when it was set up. The idea is simple: shops, restaurants and cafes make any excess food left at the end of the day available for people to buy at a knock-down rate. The most common way to do this is to offer a “magic bag” containing food worth much more than the total purchase price of its contents. It sounds great, and it has almost certainly reduced waste. But Juul claims that the app is no longer about saving food. “In Denmark you can reserve the food two or three or four days in advance,” she says. “How on earth do shops know that they will have five surplus breads three days in advance? That’s crazy. I’ve spoken to a lot of supermarkets and bakeries and they said, ‘We are using it as a sales channel’. They also have quotas of how many magic bags they have to sell per day.”
There is also a big question mark over how much of that food waste is not avoided but, rather, passed on to the consumer. Magic bags will contain a mixture of items people want and those they don’t; those they can’t eat now but can freeze and those they can’t. “The food waste just moves from the supermarket bin to your bin – and you have paid for it,” says Juul.
Juul argues that no scheme to distribute surplus food can be a solution because “we need to talk about the prevention of overproduction of food. If you go to a store even five minutes before closing time, it has every product on the shelf. If you go to a restaurant, especially canteens, they continually overproduce 30% more food. The biggest nightmare for a chef is that there’s not enough food for the guests. This is overproduction, and that is where it hurts. There are a lot of interests, economic interests, political interests, and it’s not that easy.”
One simple way to reduce food waste is to improve packaging. For example, as part of its waste-reduction push, REMA 1000 started to use two layers of packaging to extend the shelf life of its cold cut meats like rullepølse (a kind of rolled pork) and kyllingebrystfilet (chicken breast), resulting in less being thrown away. The only downside, of course, is that this means more packaging, with all the waste and greenhouse gas emissions that come with it. And the modern food system produces a lot of packaging. In the UK, the packaging industry is worth more in financial terms than all the food that comes off farms.
REMA 1000’s cold cuts encapsulate the dilemmas and trade-offs involved with food packaging and waste. Loose fruit bruises more easily, leading to more being uneaten; salad leaves stay fresh and crisp for longer when packed in airtight, nitrogen-filled plastic bags; vacuum-packed sliced hams can be kept for months when they would otherwise dry up in days. Ideally, we want less waste and less packaging, but in practice, less of one often means more of the other. As a Swedish study put it: “Packaging is often considered an environmental villain, which can lead to missed opportunities for reducing food waste.”
The right thing to do will vary from product to product, and there is some packaging that is purely cosmetic and egregious. Much depends on the specifics of the food and the packaging. In that earlier Swedish study, they found that cheese had 58 times more environmental impact than its packaging, whereas ketchup had only twice as much. Still, these and the other three foods studied – bread, milk and beef – all had a bigger environmental footprint than their wrapping. So while all packaging places a burden on planetary resources, when it is used well it helps to conserve them.
One obvious way to reduce the impact of packaging is through recycling. But once again, this isn’t easy, as Louise Nicholls discovered when she was corporate head of human rights, food sustainability and food packaging at the British retailer Marks & Spencer. The company tried to minimise the packaging it felt necessary to use, and made as much as possible 100% recyclable. But “recyclable” doesn’t always mean “recycled”. Too much of what could be recycled isn’t, and recycling is an energy-intensive process with environmental impacts of its own. Another problem is the sheer variety of types of wrapping used in the food industry. M&S decided to reduce the 11 or so materials that it used for packaging to three in order to make it easier to be able to recycle them. But even then, problems remained. “If we’re talking about packaging, you have to talk about the fact that we have a failing [recycling] infrastructure in the UK,” says Nicholls. Recycling should not be seen as a solution, but as damage limitation.
Legislation could, in theory, help to improve recycling and reduce the use of plastic, but so far it has been very limited. The UK government brought in a plastics packaging tax in 2022, the proceeds of which were meant to be invested in the infrastructure for recycling. But, as Nicholls reports: “At the last moment the government decided that they wouldn’t ringfence it for recycling and instead it’s gone straight back into the Treasury. There’s just so much stuff that could be done but it requires joined-up longer-term thinking, and it feels like lots of things are just tactical and short-term.”
What can change this? Juul believes that for the fight against food waste to be won, pressure has to keep coming from the bottom up. “The biggest impact is keeping people aware of food loss and food waste. When people act, other people act, the governments acts, the companies act.” However, well-intentioned activists, diligent shoppers and careful cookers cannot solve the waste and loss problem alone. The complexity of the issue requires action on many fronts, as illustrated by the World Resources Institute’s detailed 10-point plan. Among its required actions, two of the most significant are the development of national strategies and the creation of national public-private partnerships. The former has become a familiar demand in many areas of food policy. Food is simply too big to be left to ad hoc, piecemeal initiatives and legislation. Similarly, solutions cannot be left to business, but nor can business be left out of them.
The Maasai have a lot to teach us about the immorality of food waste. So do the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans encountered by the American agricultural scientist Franklin Hiram King in the first decade of the 20th century:
“Everything which can be made edible serves as food for man or domestic animals. Whatever cannot be eaten or worn is used for fuel. The wastes of the body, of fuel and of fabric worn beyond other use are taken back to the field; before doing so they are housed against waste from weather, compounded with intelligence and forethought and patiently laboured with through one, three or even six months, to bring them into the most efficient form to serve as manure for the soil or as feed for the crop.”
There is, however, an important difference between modern industrialised societies and traditional ones. In small-scale societies, the consequences of waste are more evident, as are the identities of the wasters. In a modern city, all this is invisible. It is not public knowledge who throws everything into the garbage and who dutifully puts their food in waste containers for collection or on compost heaps. Nor is the amount of food wasted by different households evident. As for the consequences, there is no direct link between waste in Warrington and hunger in Harare. Furthermore, the contribution of any discarded part of a meal to increases in greenhouse gases is tiny, which makes it hard for many to care.
What traditional societies show us is that for moral norms to have social traction, they have to be rooted in values everyone shares and their breach has to be evident to all. These conditions are not met for food waste in most parts of the world. Fortunately, as the growing awareness and activism over waste shows, social values can change, sometimes quite quickly. Drink-driving went from being a bit of a laugh to verboten in a few decades; racism from a casual fact of life to a prosecutable offence. As people become more aware of the problems of food waste, we can expect social attitudes to change quickly. Juul points me to a survey that suggests 94% of the Danish population think there’s much more focus on food waste today than 15 years ago.
And there are things authorities and civil society can do to make waste more visible. Regulation needs to be designed with care, or else it can be ineffectual at best or have unintended consequences at worst. We should rightly fear unwarranted state intrusion into our private lives, but no one should ever object to the state regulating behaviours that result in serious harms. Like drink-driving, littering and causing nuisance noise, excessive waste production carries a social cost that we should be obliged to pay. If we value our freedom to create waste more than we do the good of society and the planet, then something has gone very wrong indeed.
This is an edited extract from How We Eat published by Granta